


Attend to This, Love Will Follow

by wintergrey



Category: Original Work
Genre: Fanfiction, Feminism, Gen, Meta, POV Original Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-16
Updated: 2014-08-16
Packaged: 2018-02-13 10:15:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2146920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintergrey/pseuds/wintergrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The weird collision of conversations and research that got us here.</i><br/>a/n: this meta is still a work in progress as a concept and a theory but here it is, in part, in raw form.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Attend to This, Love Will Follow

* * *

To start with, a mea culpa from the past to the present: I remember a time when I was younger that I, as was and is the fashion, scoffed at Mary Sues. I'm sorry now that I did that, deeply, even if it was generally in private. I'm sorry I didn't separate the issue of bad writing (which is really nunyabidness in fanfic) from the rights of and necessity for women of any age to create characters that explored their fantasies and realities of femininity and female experience. I'm sorry that I prioritized a "feminist" depiction of women above women's self-expression. I'm sorry for the backlash that shut down exploration and growth and dialogue. I'm sorry that I didn't recognize, or wasn't far along enough in my own writing development to understand that not only are Mary Sues (and even Fifty Shades type fiction) steps on the road to exorcising internalized misogyny and societal norms, they are valid in and of themselves as expressions of people's internal lives—whether we valourize or criticize them is another matter but mocking them is and was unacceptable. It was damning of those of us in the early days of fandom to associate fantastical female characters with immaturity and to infantilize or patronize those who wrote them. It's only in these later days and by a round-about-route that I (and I hope the rest of fandom) am coming to understand the potentially vital role of the Original Female Character in fandom and transformative works.

* * *

Now, back to how I got here. Over the past years, and even more in the past months, I've spent a lot of time talking to other fanwriters about feminism, fandom, and fanfic. As a queer fanwriter of the masculine persuasion, I (and my peers) often struggle with the various fandom trends, the representation of queerness, the framing of gender and masculinity/femininity, and a sense of isolation—fandom is no country for gay men, we often say. So, is it odd that I'd end up deciding to invest time and effort into writing and supporting the writing of original female characters... maybe not at all. 

Part and parcel of the exclusion of authentic (queer) male experience from fannish spaces in which men are the subjects of interest seems to be the erasure of female experience as identified as female. Along the way, those of trans experience and those outside the gender binary are also erased or co-opted. The longer I turned the issues over in my head the more clear it was to me that the root of the problems I had with fannish focus had nothing to do with men or maleness and everything to do with misogyny and the erasure of female characters and female presence in transformative spaces.

In truth, as frustrating as it is to enjoy a hobby which is hugely problematic as it pertains to gay masculinity, men—including gay men, especially gay white men—are not hurting for voice, space, and presence in the mainstream. That's putting it mildly. Women—and especially Black women and other WOC—and their authentic experiences are given pitifully little time, space, and attention. At worst, they're Sexy Lamps. At best (for some value of it), they're Strong Female Characters without depth or dimension. Canon gives us nearly nothing in terms of female characters, Mary Sues and self-inserts are maligned and ostracized, and the traditions of fannish writing and fannish circles lean more and more to the exclusion of female characters. 

So, all that was—as we used to say in church—on my heart for months. And then, in what's going to seem like a total non sequitur, I was re-reading a book on the mechanics of attention: [Rapt](http://www.amazon.com/Rapt-Attention-Focused-Winifred-Gallagher-ebook/dp/B001V6P12E/). In Rapt, the author lays out the case, as supported by everyone from neurologists to painters, for a simple connection: **what you pay attention to, you love**.

When placed in the context of media and misogyny, the idea that the subjects or objects to which you spend your time attending are the ones you love— _not because they are more loveable or more worthy of love but because you have given them your attention_ —becomes both radical and terrifying. To say that this whole notion, as it intersected with my thoughts on fandom and media and their treatment of women and how those of us (all of us) who consume and transform media are being shaped by this mechanic, hit me like a ton of bricks in a bucket of ice water would be an understatement. 

Fanfic is a transformative work. That transformation can take any form we like. **That which we attend to, we love**. If a class of people or characters is maligned and neglected, it seemed to me that the most radical answer to that was to facilitate paying attention to them. 

 ** _Some salient quotes from_  Rapt**:

 

> William James’s simple experiment on how to improve your ability to pay attention. First, he says, make a dot on a piece of paper or a wall, then try to stay focused on it. In short order, your mind will wander. Next, start asking yourself questions about the dot: its size, shape, color, and so on. Make associations with it: its existential pathos, perhaps, or the dot as yang to the paper’s yin. Once you’re engaged in such elaboration, you’ll find that you can focus on the negligible mark for quite a while. Observing that this ability to attend to and develop even the humblest subject is a cornerstone of creativity, James says, “This is what the genius does, in whose hands a given topic coruscates and grows.”

This is one of the reasons I set up the questionnaires for the OFCs and why I opted to give them their own meta section even though it's not specifically "fanfic", because I really do believe that the depth of attention and care that we show to a character increases our ability to appreciate and adore them.

 

> a thought must be developed and embroidered on if it is to achieve its full potential. In a fortuitous circular dynamic, whenever you engage in a creative activity, you boost your level of positive emotion, which in turn literally widens your attentional range, giving you more material to work with.

Salient to the idea of the community as a whole and our planned "rescue missions" and just plain paying attention to female characters. The more time you spend on creating work related to female characters, the more affection you develop, the better you feel about them and the work, and the more depth you see in them.

 

> Illustrating the connections among attention, engagement, and affection, Langer says, “Imagine that you’ve had the same spouse for many years. If you look for a way in which he’s different today, you’ll find something. That makes him more interesting and, probably, more likable.” Similarly, whether or not you care for football, the more you notice various things about a game—“even if it’s just the players’ rear ends,” says Langer—the more you’ll like it and be able to focus on it without strain. “If something is enjoyable, you don’t need other reasons to do it. Mindfulness feels good, so this way of paying attention reinforces itself.”

I really believe that some of why we don't pay attention to CFCs and OFCs relates to some of our feedback/reward systems in our brain. When we are in concert with others on a subject, we actually increase our oxytocin levels and experience an extra level of reward. When we are moving against the crowd, our brain actually reacts as though we're being punished. Research has found that it takes little to cancel out that punishment, though, as small a thing as one other person out of twenty agreeing with us. When the group, fannish writers and fandom, moves toward the erasure of female characters it becomes even harder to write them. We are out of synch.

It's my hope that by providing a group to support and attend to female characters (especially OFCs), the rewards of writing them will be increased—and everyone who participates will have a hand in building that engine.

 


End file.
